HotBugs.jar: A Benchmark of Hot Fixes for Time-Critical Bugs
Carol Hanna, Federica Sarro, Mark Harman, Justyna Petke
TL;DR
The paper presents HotBugs.jar, the first benchmark explicitly focused on real-world hot fixes for time-critical bugs, addressing a gap in empirical software engineering resources. By mining ten mature Apache projects and leveraging Jira data, the authors identify 746 patches, validate 679 as genuine hot fixes, and demonstrate that 110 are reproducible with test suites, integrating the reproducible subset within the Bugs.jar framework. The construction pipeline covers project sourcing, issue collection, manual categorization, validation, and rigorous integration into a reproducible, metadata-rich dataset; the work is already adopted as the SBSE Conference Challenge Track dataset, underscoring its practical impact. The authors discuss research opportunities (rapid debugging, automated repair, triage modeling, CI/CD evaluation) and acknowledge limitations (validation disagreements, Jira metadata quality, external validity limited to ten Apache projects), outlining future work to broaden language coverage and tooling integration.
Abstract
Hot fixes are urgent, unplanned changes deployed to production systems to address time-critical issues. Despite their importance, no existing evaluation benchmark focuses specifically on hot fixes. We present HotBugs$.$jar, the first dataset dedicated to real-world hot fixes. From an initial mining of 10 active Apache projects totaling over 190K commits and 150K issue reports, we identified 746 software patches that met our hot-fix criteria. After manual evaluation, 679 were confirmed as genuine hot fixes, of which 110 are reproducible using a test suite. Building upon the Bugs$.$jar framework, HotBugs$.$jar integrates these 110 reproducible cases and makes available all 679 manually validated hot fixes, each enriched with comprehensive metadata to support future research. Each hot fix was systematically identified using Jira issue data, validated by independent reviewers, and packaged in a reproducible format with buggy and fixed versions, test suites, and metadata. HotBugs$.$jar has already been adopted as the official challenge dataset for the Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) Conference Challenge Track, demonstrating its immediate impact. This benchmark enables the study and evaluation of tools for rapid debugging, automated repair, and production-grade resilience in modern software systems to drive research in this essential area forward.